Knowledge is an ocean and a few drops just aren’t enough. -Unknown

The Scarcity of Traditional Ulema August 4, 2007

“Perhaps the biggest challenge in learning Islam correctly today is the scarcity of traditional ‘ulema. In this meaning, Bukhari relates the sahih or ‘rigorously authenticated’ hadith that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,

‘Truly, Allah does not remove Sacred Knowledge by taking it out of servants, but rather by taking back the souls of Islamic scholars [in death], until, when He has not left a single scholar, the people take the ignorant as leaders, who are asked for and who give Islamic legal opinion without knowledge, misguided and misguiding’ (Bukhari, 1.36: 100. S).

The process described by the hadith is not yet completed, but has certainly begun, and in our times, the lack of traditional scholars—whether in Islamic law, in hadith, in tafsir or ‘Qur’anic exegesis’—has given rise to an understanding of the religion that is far from scholarly, and sometimes far from the truth. For example, in the course of our own studies in Islamic law, our first impression from Orientalist and Muslim-reformer literature was that the Imams of the madhhabs or ‘schools of jurisprudence’ had brought a set of rules from completely outside the Islamic tradition and somehow imposed them upon the Muslims. But when we sat with traditional scholars in the Middle East and asked them about the details, we came away with a different point of view, having been taught something about the bases for deriving the law from the Qur’an and sunna.”

"We have devoted our lives to seeking knowledge of the heart; knowledge that will carry us to our soul’s destination. Your minds have limits but not your hearts, for they are receptacles of endless capacity. But, you must open your hearts to this knowledge, as nothing may pass through what is closed.”

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.- Isaac Asimov